La Symphonie pastorale Reading Order

La Symphonie pastorale (The Pastoral Symphony, 1919) by André Gide is a short novel in the form of a journal kept by a Protestant pastor in the Swiss mountains who takes in Gertrude, a blind orphan girl, and undertakes her education. As Gertrude blossoms under his instruction — he reads to her, introduces her to music, teaches her to think — the pastor falls in love with her, though he refuses to recognise this in himself, interpreting his attachment as purely paternal and charitable. The novel is a precise psychological study of self-deception: the pastor reads the Gospels exclusively for the passages that support what he wants to do, ignores the passages that would condemn it, and builds an elaborate spiritual justification for his behaviour while his actual family — his wife, his children — suffers the consequences of his neglect. Gide was interested throughout his career in the ways religious belief could be used as a cover for desire, and La Symphonie pastorale is the most perfectly executed of these studies: compact, controlled, and devastating in its irony, because the pastor himself never notices what every reader can see from the first pages.